Iran's Nezammafi expresses joy at winning Japanese literary prize

+

TOKYO, May 8 Kyodo -
Shirin Nezammafi, an Iranian resident of Osaka, expressed her joy at winning an
award for new writers of Japanese fiction at a ceremony held on Friday.
''I am elated because I didn't expect to win it,'' the 29-year-old native of
Tehran said in Japanese as she received the 108th Bungakukai Shinjinsho award
for her work ''Shiroi Kami'' (white paper) about a teen romance set in a small
town in Iran against the backdrop of the Iran-Iraq war during the 1980s.
Nezammafi is the second non-native Japanese speaker to win the prize, following
resident Chinese writer Yang Yi, who bagged the award in 2007 and won the
prestigious Akutagawa Prize for Japanese literature last year.
Nezammafi, whose mother tongue is Persian, started familiarizing herself with
Japanese writing when she was in high school and came to study in Japan in
1999.
She has been working at a major electronics maker as a system engineer since
completing graduate courses at Kobe University. Nezammafi also won a Japanese
literary award for foreign students in 2006 for a piece of fiction.
''Since there aren't many authors in Japan who write about Iran, I thought
people might be interested if I wrote without translating,'' Nezammafi said in
fluent Japanese. ''From now on, I would like to depict what people think and
how they live without relying on a major theme such as war.''
==Kyodo